Adrienne Kennedy American Literature Analysis
Kennedy admittedly bases her writing on autobiographical characters and events; however, the autobiographical elements are more profoundly symbolic than simply historic. She is a poet of the theater who purposefully explores the fragmented symbols within her subconscious as her most viable means of survival.
Kennedy’s riveting, nonlinear, one-act dramatic style reflects an inner world of discordant realities at war with one another. As such, her plots are rarely chronological, and her characters are frequently more than multifaceted. Rather, they are simultaneously characters who are yet other characters who are yet other characters. For example, Funnyhouse of a Negro’s cast of characters has as its protagonist “the Negro-Sarah,” whose selves are the Duchess of Hapsburg, Queen Victoria Regina, Jesus, and Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba is not only Lumumba, historically a murdered Congolese prime minister considered by many a savior, but also Sarah’s dead rapist father, who returns to haunt her until she hangs herself.
Kennedy’s surrealistic dramatic style challenges audiences and readers, demanding that they be receptive enough and flexible enough to empathize, to recognize the common elements in their own unconscious perceptions of events. The action takes place in a series of nightmarish sequences and transfigurations that blend into one another through the use of masks, ritual, and repetition. Devastating portrayals of rage and grief demythologize cultural expectations. Wave after wave of piercing imagery bombards the senses, until the separations between characters and spectators are destroyed.
Kennedy is female and black. With the exception of the male role in Sun, her dramatic spokespeople are also female and black. Kennedy’s world is a world of nonexistence, of alienation and absence. One of her dominant themes is the need for each individual to have a congruent context in which to exist. In A Lesson in Dead Language, seven female students in white dresses soiled by menstrual blood ask why they bleed, only to receive an answer from White Dog, their female teacher, that they bleed because they are being punished. With guilt-inducing references to the deaths of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the Wise Men, and the Shepherd, White Dog implies that the murders of Julius Caesar and Malcolm X are also involved in the girls’ menstruation.
As a black woman, Kennedy writes of the estrangement of blacks in a white world: blacks such as the Negro-Sarah, who would rather die than be black, in Funnyhouse of a Negro; blacks such as the young Suzanne, who wraps her hair so tightly in rollers to straighten it that her scalp bleeds nightly in The Ohio State Murders (1992); and blacks such as Clara, who becomes a bystander in her own life in A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White.
Kennedy relentlessly examines the ego destruction inherent in being black and “believing white.” Unattainable, romanticized white ideals can lead only to repressed frustration, self-fragmentation, self-loathing, and ego death. With her recurrent imagery of Nazis, murder, multiple personae, infanticide, gnawing rats, and blood, Kennedy provocatively dramatizes the terrors of spiritual suffocation and agitates for the freedom of the individual spirit.
The playwright reveals intimate, unconscious distortions of internalized socially acceptable norms to demonstrate their deadly potential. In Funnyhouse of a Negro , blood covers the Negro-Sarah’s face, and she carries a clump of her hair that has fallen out. The Duchess of Hapsburg, one of Sarah’s selves, hides behind a white mask as she struggles to return her hair from a paper bag to her head. Patrice Lumumba has an ebony mask, because his face has been shattered into unrecognizable fragments. The Mother, bald and insane, refuses to acknowledge that...
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the Negro-Sarah exists.
Religious ideals of the white world are another source of internalized alienation. Clara in The Owl Answers becomes not the caged white bird (who is God’s dove) of her adopted father, the Reverend Passmore, but an owl, a mysterious and magical bird of the darkness. In Funnyhouse of a Negro, Jesus is not the tall, slender, charismatic white ideal but a misshapen dwarf who has vowed to murder Lumumba because he has discovered that a black man, not God, is his father. Parodying the incantatory ritual of a Catholic Mass, A Rat’s Mass concludes with the execution of Brother Rat and Sister Rat by a death squad consisting of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Wise Men, and a Shepherd; holy Rosemary, in her white Communion dress, watches. Clearly, in Kennedy’s internal universe, the ideals of white Christianity are toxic to a centered black identity.
In The Alexander Plays, the central character in each of four connected plays is the writer Suzanne Alexander, an older version of Kennedy’s earlier protagonists. In She Talks to Beethoven, Suzanne is visited in Ghana by the Romantic composer Ludwig van Beethoven, who keeps her company as she awaits word of her missing husband, David. Suzanne describes herself as having been put together by a new self after exploding into fragments. The Film Club, a monologue by Suzanne, and The Dramatic Circle, a radio play dramatizing The Film Club, concern Suzanne’s life in London after David has once again disappeared. In The Ohio State Murders, Suzanne, approximately thirty years later, discloses for the first time the events surrounding the deaths of her twin daughters. Also significant is the play’s description of the older Suzanne as “Suzanne (Present).” In Kennedy’s dramatic world of alienation and absence, this character is fully centered. Suzanne Alexander is a survivor.
Even though Kennedy’s dramatic technique is more linear and her characters are less overtly nightmarish in The Alexander Plays, the menace is palpable. In these plays, the destructive forces are external, and the dichotomy is a chronological swing between past and present. The dissonance between the controlled narration and the horrifying events accentuates the threatening environment in which Suzanne lives. References to Kennedy’s earlier playscripts serve as subtle reminders of the internal dysfunction her characters have experienced.
In The Film Club, Suzanne Alexander concludes her monologue with a quotation from the revolutionary black philosopher Frantz Fanon. With this passage, Kennedy reminds everyone that the battle continues to rage and that its ineradicable damage will have to be diligently attended to for many years, lest the wounds putrefy and the war be lost.
A Rat’s Mass
First produced: 1966 (first published, 1968)
Type of work: Play
Brother Rat and Sister Rat seek atonement but are murdered in the midst of a grotesquely shifting, distorted world of holy imagery, Nazi executioners, gnawed sunflower petals, and dead babies.
A Rat’s Mass was first produced and directed in Boston by David Wheeler, an avant-garde director for the Theater Company of Boston. In September, 1969, following a successful run in Italy, A Rat’s Mass was produced by Ellen Stewart for New York audiences at the La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, with Seth Allen directing.
The universe of A Rat’s Mass is Brother Rat’s and Sister Rat’s. It is a bizarre maelstrom of terror, oppression, sacrilege, and rage in a malignant conflict to the death. In this universe, Brother Rat has a human body but the head of a rat, and Sister Rat has a human head but a rat’s belly. A procession of Two Wise Men, a Shepherd, Joseph, Mary, and Jesus alternately watch and march as Brother Rat (whose name is Blake) and Sister Rat (whose name is Kay) recall their childhood days of innocence, before their holy home was invaded by screaming worms and gnawing rats in the attic.
Rosemary, an Italian Catholic wearing a Communion dress and carrying a catechism book, is a Medusa-like character with worms rather than snakes in her hair. Unlike Blake and Kay, she has a world in which she belongs, a religious heritage, a historic ancestry. Blake and Kay love her as their best friend. They revere her beauty, her holiness, her sense of belonging. At her urging, Brother Rat commits incest with Sister Rat on a playground slide, while Rosemary watches, to prove his love for Rosemary. Then they swear on her catechism book and their father’s Bible that they will never tell anyone.
Sister Rat, however, becomes pregnant and has a nervous breakdown. She is taken in an ambulance to a state hospital. Upon her return, Brother Rat and Sister Rat beg Rosemary to help them atone. She refuses and tells them to commit suicide by using their father’s shotgun to put bullets through their heads. Brother Rat and Sister Rat beg for the return of innocence.
Finally, the procession deserts Brother Rat and Sister Rat, whose voices and body language are growing more and more ratlike. Brother Rat admits his unwillingness to accept responsibility for his incestuous actions, preferring instead to believe that someone else has impregnated Sister Rat. Brother Rat’s central conflict has been his need to protect Sister Rat and his love for Rosemary. The increasingly loud sound of the rats’ gnawing and escalating battle sounds accompany the return of the procession, who have become shotgun-bearing Nazis who murder Brother Rat and Sister Rat. Rosemary remains unscathed.
A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White
First produced: 1976 (first published, 1984)
Type of work: Play
A struggling writer, Clara, places prominent Hollywood actors from her favorite black-and-white 1950’s movies in leading roles to enact her life crises.
A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White opened at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1976 as a work in progress. This one-act play is introduced by the Columbia Pictures Lady speaking in Clara’s stead. Each scene is first a film set, with the leading roles played by the film’s primary actors. Places and people from Clara’s life, including Clara, who has only a bit part, appear in parallel supporting roles. In her stage directions, Kennedy describes the supporting actors’ attitudes toward the leads as “deadly serious.”
Characters in scene 1 include actors Bette Davis and Paul Henreid in a scene set on an ocean liner from the film Now, Voyager (1942); the scene simultaneously occurs in a Cleveland hospital lobby in June and July of 1955. Clara’s mother and father, as they were in a 1929 photograph, are on deck. Clara silently joins them, but she isolates herself from the action by writing in a notebook and allowing Bette Davis to speak for her of marital discord, a miscarriage, fears of bleeding to death in labor, and childhood traumas. Clara’s dominant response to emotional confrontation is to read passages from The Owl Answers, which she has apparently been writing in her notebook. As the scene ends, Clara enters her comatose brother’s hospital room and relates what she sees to the film Viva Zapata! (1952).
Scene 2, with Jean Peters and Marlon Brando in Viva Zapata!, takes place in the hospital room as well as in a wedding-night scene from Viva Zapata! and in a Now, Voyager stateroom. According to the stage directions, “there is no real separation” between the film scenes and Clara’s life at any time during the play. From the hospital/wedding-night bed, Jean Peters speaks for Clara, then rises and falls bleeding onto the bed. Marlon Brando helps her to change the black sheets, leaving the bloodied sheets on the floor. Clara’s mother and her father, now in their fifties, divorced and feuding, are present at their son’s bedside. Scene 2 ends with Clara observing her parents from the doorway as her mother explains what she knows of her son’s automobile accident.
Scene 3, with Shelley Winters and Montgomery Clift from A Place in the Sun (1951), is set in Clara’s childhood room. The scene directly reveals Clara: isolated, fearful, standing on the sidelines of her own life, living in the past, bleeding, and uncertain of the truths of her writing. Clara has filled her absence from her own life with romantic film characters she can never become. She has recognized, however, that writing is her weapon against her lack of belonging, her means of revealing her repressed, fragmented selves and transforming them into a presence with whom she can “co-exist in a true union.” If she does not successfully revolt against her embrace of Hollywood’s romanticized ideal and assume a leading role in her life, she, like the character played by Shelley Winters in the film, will drown in silence.
The Ohio State Murders
First produced: 1992 (first published, 1992)
Type of work: Play
Successful writer Suzanne Alexander lectures at her alma mater, Ohio State University, only to reexperience the racism that tainted her student years.
The Ohio State Murders was commissioned by the Great Lakes Theater Festival of Cleveland, Ohio, in 1989. It was directed by Gerald Freedman for the Great Lakes Theater Festival’s thirtieth anniversary season as a part of the nonprofit company’s 1992 Adrienne Kennedy Festival. The play is presented in multiple brief scenes filtered through the memory of the present Suzanne, who acts as narrator. From the stacks of the university library, the writer relives the debasing experiences of Suzanne as a college student from 1949 to 1951.
As a black student, Suzanne is the target of insidious, as well as overt, racism critically destructive to her ego identity. She is told that certain streets are regarded as exclusively white and that an English curriculum is considered too difficult for black people to declare as a major course of study; in the face of such racism, Suzanne’s self-concept deteriorates. She becomes uneasy, anxious, and frightened. Even her white dormitory mates seem to her to be capable of racially motivated murder.
Suzanne’s sole source of joy in her freshman year is a required course on the Victorian novel taught by Robert Hampshire, an unemotional white man in his first year of teaching at Ohio State. Fascinated by Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), Suzanne begins to draw parallels between her life and the successively restrictive, tragic life of Tess. The present Suzanne concludes that Hardy’s fictional universe is one in which characters face destruction because its society forces conformity, thereby suppressing the human spirit.
Jarring these reminiscences are the present Suzanne’s succinct revelations that someone murdered one of her twin daughters, who were conceived with Robert Hampshire during the school’s Christmas break in 1950. Hampshire dismisses the young Suzanne’s announcement that she is pregnant as impossible. Soon after, the dormitory director reveals that she has been secretly searching through Suzanne’s belongings and has read her diary to the dormitory committee. Consequently, Suzanne is expelled from the dormitory and the university as unsuitable. After the birth of her twins, Suzanne returns to Columbus with her daughters to stay in a boardinghouse run by a family friend.
One of the dominant sources of dramatic tension in The Ohio State Murders is the present Suzanne’s achronological commentary, which allows the audience to know more than the young Suzanne does. For example, she is unaware that Hampshire has been following her, and she endures the suspicions of the Columbus police for more than a year without knowing that it is Hampshire who has kidnapped and drowned one of her children.
While Suzanne works at her part-time night job in the law library, Hampshire presents himself at the boardinghouse as a graduate researcher. Once inside, he kills his second twin daughter and himself with a kitchen knife. The present Suzanne describes with horrifying simplicity the months she spent willing herself to die, while the university and her father covered up the true story of the Ohio State murders. Juxtaposed to these revelations is the present Suzanne’s summation that these experiences are the primary source of violent imagery in her writing.